The role of automatic and deliberate mental imagery in multi-sensory digital consumer environments.

Living and working online has been boosted in the battle against the pandemic. As we are now
carefully approaching the pandemic aftermath, it becomes clear that the pandemic containment
measures have instilled long-lasting habit changes in the sense that many interactions in society will
remain more digital or technology-mediated than before. One of the shortcomings that are currently
still inherent to digital interfaces, is the fact that they tend to rely only on audiovisual information
transfer. In this research project, we examine how the forgotten sense of touch can also be appealed
to, facing this new digital normal in the context of consumer purchase decision making. As many
sensory-enabling technologies are still in their infancy, and most of them not yet ready for massmarket consumer purposes, this research project focuses rather on how haptic imagery can be
evoked, under which conditions drivers for mental haptic imagery work (or not), and what effects
they can have in diverse consumer contexts. After first pushing the boundaries of the present
literature on mental imagery, we will look further into the potential of evoking and influencing mental
imagery and subsequent consumer reactions in combination with crossmodal correspondences, VR,
and AR. These research objectives are explored via a mix of measurements (e.g., implicit association
testing, mouse tracking, product evaluations, and actual behavior) and a combination of lab
experiments and field research.